How to Make Monkfish Stew Without a Recipe

By day, Carla Lalli Music edits food features for Bon Appetit, but at home she shuns instructions. Here’s how she feeds her friends and family while Cooking Without Recipes.

(Credit: Carla Lalli Music)

Browning the monkfish in coconut oil

Cooking the leeks and fennel

Adding basil after stewing the fish and vegetables with jarred, roasted tomatoes

No one knows how to cook like my friend Stephen Kelemen. He’s got pots and pans hanging from wood beams in his kitchen of his house on the north fork of Long Island, rhubarb, mint and alliums of every variety twisting out of the earth in his garden, access to the most pristine seafood and seasonal produce at the farm stands that line both sides of the road to his place, and he knows what to do with it all. I love being his guest: I’ll happily make the trip to KK’s farm or Sang Lee to see what they’ve got while I’m there, I’ll do dishes, I’ll chop and prep whatever’s put in front of me, but I’d prefer it if Stephen did the cooking.

Stephen’s the kind of guy who makes majestic pastry dough without consulting a recipe, bakes it twice as long I would, then serves a pie that grown men fight over. He’s got a fire pit in his backyard that we’ve cooked whole animals on, to great success and basically through trial and error. Suffice it to say, if Steve is at the stove, you want a seat at the table.

I watched him assemble this seafood stew a couple of weeks ago for a late, lazy Sunday lunch. It started with
a generous amount of coconut oil in one of his cast iron pans. Why coconut oil? “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, ” I just love the flavor.” Enough said.
Then he seared pieces of monkfish, which he had cut crosswise so the spine bone was still running through them. When those were browned, he set them aside and added
a bunch of sliced leeks to build flavor, along with sliced fennel he’d gotten from a farm nearby. The inspiration was bouillabaisse, albeit a saffron-less, very pared-down version.

After the leeks and fennel were tender, he added his own
jarred, roasted tomatoes (I know, I know–try Muir Glen’s fire-roasted ones instead) and a few glugs of
pork stock leftover from braising pig’s trotters (use chicken stock). Salt and pepper were involved, along with fresh thyme and basil. When the tomato-y liquid was tasting delicious, he added the monkfish back to the pan, just to finish cooking through. We ate it outside, with plenty of
good baguette to dip in our bowls, picking the fish up with our fingers to eat it off the bone.

When I called to ask for the recipe, Stephen laughed at me.
What recipe? After talking through the parts we could both remember, he said, “Well, you still don’t have a recipe–just make it taste good, and design it to your friends.” Good advice under any circumstance.